Steam Deck EmuDeck Setup Guide: How To Install

February 9, 2023

With the Steam Deck rapidly becoming easy to get ahold of thanks to Valve fixing stock issues, fans are finally getting their hands on Valve’s handheld system and learning its sheer power of it. You can obviously play all your Steam games, but you can also play other things on it if you know what you’re doing by setting up EmDdeck. Luckily we have a Steam Deck Emudeck setup guide for you, meaning you’ll know exactly how to install a whole host of emulators.

How to install Emudeck on Steam Deck

Emudeck is a bundle of emulators that install onto the Steam Deck as one package, but there are a few steps before you can start playing all of your old games.

If you want to install your emulators onto an SD card, you first need to format it to either ext4 or btrfs as a file system
Grab the EmuDeck installer from the official site, drop the file onto the desktop of the Steam Deck itself, and run it
EmuDeck will run you through the installation of all the emulators. If you don’t really know what you’re doing, then stick with the easy install which will run through everything with the greatest of ease. Custom installation is more complicated, but does allow you to choose exactly what you want.
Once installation is finished close Steam. This’ll make it slightly tougher to navigate desktop mode, but it is necessary.
Open the installed Steam Rom manager.
Press preview, generate the app list, and wait for all of the images to download. Then save the app list. This means you’ll be able to see the emulators in game mode.
Close the Steam Rom manager, return to game mode and you should be able to see everything waiting for you.

That’s pretty much all you need to do for the Steam Deck EmuDeck setup.